


Sound Masking

by oxfordRoulette



Series: Underworld [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 19:13:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5345465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordRoulette/pseuds/oxfordRoulette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You think you need an epilogue.</p><p>(Epilogue to Genesis/<a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/68271">Underworld Series</a>. Don't read this if you haven't read the other five fics.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sound Masking

**Author's Note:**

> Don't read if you haven't read the [Underworld Series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/68271), and Genesis. You will be very lost.

Hey 8uddy! It’s me, Vriska! And holy crap was it hard to get your num8er 8ut of course I overcame all challenges in my way and managed to snag it.  
Anyway, I heard you’re awake now! Jeez that took a long time. How was your 8eauty rest?  
........  
I’ll take that silence as an indicator you are heavily invested in this conversation!!!!!!!!  
So, normally I don’t do this kind of stuff, you know?  
I usually don’t su8mit to this level.  
8ut I’ve got a GR8 offer for you. An excellent deal. Once in a lifetime.  
And Terezi turned me down, can you 8elieve it? Don’t 8e a sucker like her.  
So........  
How ‘8out you eat my heart?  
I won’t even struggle! You can just yank it right out and I’m allllllll yours.  
........  
Nothing? You’d 8e a idiot to pass up on a meal like this.  
You’ve got to 8e starving after that nap.  
And I assure you, I have excellent taste.  
NO.  
Huh?  
FUCK OFF.  
Don’t 8e like that! You’ll 8e 8egging for me soon. Is Jade gone? Then you’ve got noooooooo8ody to feed off of.  
I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE AFTER, AND YOU’RE NOT GETTING IT.  
YOU SHOULD BE LUCKY- WAIT, NO- LUCKY!!!!!!!! THAT MY PAST SELF FOUND ENOUGH COMPASSION IN HIM TO *NOT* LEAVE YOU BURIED AND DEAD UNDER SIX HUNDRED TONS OF SEATTLE OCEAN WATER. I’M NOT SURE IF MY PRESENT SELF WOULD DO THE SAME.  
APPRECIATE WHAT YOU’VE GOT, VRISKA, BECAUSE EVEN *THIS* MORTAL FATE IS TOO GOOD FOR YOU. YOU’RE GETTING A 70 YEAR EXTENSION ON A LIFE THAT SHOULD HAVE ENDED MILLENNIA AGO.  
YOU WILL DIE WITH YOUR HEART IN YOUR CHEST CAVITY, AND I WILL COME AND PERSONALLY FLIP OFF YOUR TOMBSTONE AS YOU ROT IN WHATEVER POST-META-GOD-HELL YOU GO TO.  
HAVE A NICE LIFE, VRISKA. WHAT’S LEFT OF IT ANYWAY.  
Hey!!!!!!!! That’s not nice at all!!!!!!!!  
Also, what are you thinking???????? You’re going to need me someday!!!!!!!! You’re going to starve!!!!!!!!  
........ Helloooooooo?  
Karkat?

 

You’ve only got one power left.

You've got no idea if it was intentionally left to you or not, but knowing Karkat, he probably just sucked at being thorough. Missed one, silly little power. You wish it were at least something cool and useful, but the only thing you can think of using it for is some stupid weather related pranks. You haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet, but one day… One day, the perfect opportunity will arise and someone will find themselves prone to a trademarked John Egbert gaff. Chuckles will be had. It will be awesome.

But besides for conspiring on what will assuredly be a great use for this lame power, you haven’t really thought about all the god stuff in, like, forever, and plan on keeping it that way. Any time Dave or Kanaya tries to text you about something even remotely divine you set your phone down for a couple hours and then eventually reply with a bunch of ice cream emojis or something. You’re not really sure why you do this. You just don’t want to talk about it, you guess.

Your plans of not talking or thinking about 'god stuff' for long periods of time are smashed against the ground when Vriska shows up at your door.

“Heeeeeeeey,” she says grinning, with a backpack over one shoulder, daisy dukes and a tank top and a thong sticking out around the edges of her hips. “Long time no see! Why’d you have to move, it took so long to find your new apartment it was unbelievable! I mean, it’s not like it-”

You attempt to shut the door on her. She slams both her arms and a leg in the crack, and pushes it back open.

“Vriska, I don’t want to talk to you! Ever again!” you shout, trying to push the door shut. She’s doing this bracing thing with her body and no matter how hard you push you can’t budge her an inch and wow you really need to start lifting weights or something. "I think you're crazy, and I actually... might kind of hate you? I don't really hate anyone, but you, you, you're something special!"

"Haven't you ever heard of a rivalmance!” Vriska shouts back, clearly exerting a lot of effort to keep your front door open. “It’s a thing! Let’s start one! Come on!”

“No! God no! Why are you even here!”

The door slams shut with all of your body weight as Vriska suddenly gives up. You stagger, then against your better judgment, you reopen the door to see why she did that.

You’ve never seen her like this. She’s standing there, stick straight, staring at the ground almost like she’s bowing to you. She lets her hair hang over her face. "I don't have anywhere else to go."

And that's why you end up letting her in.

You unceremoniously dump her in the guest bedroom and lay down some base rules for her: Don’t interrupt me when I’m practicing, if you don’t get a job in eight days you’re out of here, dinner’s at six unless it’s a Sunday, and buy groceries every once in a while if you’re going to eat with me.

She ends up _kind of_ following these rules, but only because she’s never in the apartment. Seriously, you have no idea what she does all day and night, but once in a blue moon she’ll knock on your bedroom door while grinning and hand you money for rent in cash. You never, ever ask how she gets this money. You never, ever want to know. Although you do always check if the bills are counterfeit, you wouldn’t put it past her. But overall it’s kind of like having a spooky ghost as a roommate who shows up and gives you money sometimes, which is sort of cool, you guess.

Although it was only a matter of time before the spooky ghost started rattling her chains.

It’s four in the morning, you woke up again after a dream you can’t remember and can’t get back to sleep. It’s snowing out your window, and you’ve been watching the flakes fall down in the dim orange streetlight for the past half hour when you get the chilling awareness that someone is in your room. Your spine freezes up and your hands grow cold and you carefully rotate away from the light. You raise yourself up on your elbows, slowly, and see Vriska against your closed door, curled up into a ball, sitting with her head against her knees.

How long has she been there? You didn’t hear the door open, it must have been a long time. That’s really freaky.

"Vriska,” you whisper, because it’s too early for noise. “Vriska, what the hell are you doing in my room?”

Her head snaps up, and orange light reflects off her wide, manic eyes like flames. She throws something on the ground, her phone maybe, the screen’s all lit up like she was texting somebody, and stands up as though she was going to war. She’s wearing a big baggy shirt and clearly nothing else.

“I can’t sleep,” she says, and she’s monotone. “Have sex with me.”

You abandon the whisper thing. “What? No? Uh, that’s never happening ever again? Vriska, it’s four in the morning, please leave.”

“Maybe if you fucked me to exhaustion I could go to sleep,” she says, approaching your bed. She sounds so spiteful. You sit up fully.

“No. Vriska do _not_ come any closer, you’re really freaking me out.”

“It doesn’t matter if you want to or not, because I can just mind control you! I could do that now, because you hate me!" she yelled. "I'd force you to like it, too, I’d force you to be into me."

She puts her fingers to her temples, grits her teeth, and concentrates real hard like it’s actually going to accomplish something. You can’t believe this is happening, she really _is_ crazy. “You can’t do that anymore.”

She glares at you, then hurdles herself over the bed, tackling you down into the pillows. You don’t really fight her, but you’re not sure why. You guess you have this belief she’s not going to hurt you, or _can’t_ hurt you. She straddles you over the blankets, wraps her hands around your throat, but she can’t bring herself to squeeze.

“I can make you do whatever I want. See?” she says, and you notice her eyes are wet. “I can still hurt you even with my weak little mortal arms.” A tear slips down her cheek. “I can still come out on top.” A couple more fall down, her voice is choking up now. “I’m still just as powerful.”

Just as suddenly as her tackle-straddle, Vriska drops her weird grimace, makes a noise like she just got punched, and begins to bawl. You watch her melt down, and you feel a combination of satisfied and empathetic. You tug her hands off your neck with a light pull on her wrists. Her eyes open wide at your resistance and tears begin to drip down her cheeks onto your shirt. You resist the urge to shove her off you in favor of ‘doing the right thing,’ as your dad always taught you to do.

“What’s got you so scared?” you ask, and you can’t bring yourself to ask it gently, even though you want to try and be nice. “Did you have a bad dream?”

She covers her eyes with her forearm, trying to hide the fact she’s crying. “I’m not scared! I’m not. I was just thinking how _pathetic_ it is that humans have lives like bugs, you know? It’s like, a blink of an eye, and then poof you’re gone. I never bothered making friends with anybody who wasn’t going to last that long, but now I _have_ to. I don’t understand how anybody can keep living knowing that they’re going to be out like a light in mere decades.”

It’s hard to _not_ connect the dots on that one. Vriska’s scared of death. You never understood that kind of fear. You’re the kind of guy who is more scared of your friends dying than your own self. You raise an eyebrow at her. “Well, you’ll probably be alive until you’re about 80 or 90 if you don’t develop a bad drug habit and overdose on cocaine or something. And maybe by that time we can upload our brains to computers and live as long as we want? That would be cool.”

She uncovers her eyes and glowers at you. “Really?”

“Maybe. I dunno, I dropped the programming thing in high school, but I guess it’s possible for cyborgs to be thing in a couple decades.”

“Having a cyborg arm would be awesome. Or like a biometric eye with super vision,” she says, sniffling. “I’m going to make one for myself. A hot immortal robot body.”

“It’s kind of hard. There’s a reason I didn’t major in computer stuff. You have to know lots of math and physics and biology to do robotics,” you say.

Vriska gets off of you, and scoots to the edge of your bed, facing away from you with her head in her hands. “I can do that, I can learn anything. I’m sure it’s easier than you think, you must not have the brains for it. But it’s not my fault if I don’t have the _time_ to learn it…”

You sit up again. You resist the urge to touch her back. “Sixty or so years is a long time.”

“That’s stupid. That’s something a human would say.”

You want her to feel better, weirdly. Despite everything. You hatch an idea in your head, something that comes out of nowhere, something to help her.

"I don't think I can solve all your problems Vriska," you say, because it's true. "Or any of them really. I think the fear of being mortal and the loss of your powers is all pretty dense stuff you're going to have to work out on your own. But... I think I can fix one of them. I'll help you get to sleep."

She turns to you and wipes away the various fluids from her crying fit onto the back of her arm. With a stuffy voice, she says, "It'd better be from fucking me until exhaustion."

"Nah," you say. "You know better than that. But you can sleep in my bed if you want, as long as you don’t touch me.”

“Okay, I guess,” she says, disappointed. “Whatcha going to do?”

You close your eyes, focus on that one little spark left inside of you, and use the lamest superpower known to man.

There isn’t a single person in this world who can resist the sound of a storm. Some people might like the grand clash of thunder, some people might like the gentle sound of light rain, but everyone’s got a weak spot for feeling safe. And you think Vriska wants to feel safe right now. That’s why she came in your room.

You craft a soundscape that’s pretty much white noise, all rain, thunder and wind here and there, something that sounds like it’s coming from outside and far away. Vriska snaps her head towards the window, then back at you, as you add in the sound of hail gently pattering down on the roof.

“You got to keep it? Godhood?” she asks, and it’s half in awe and half in jealous anger.

“No,” you say, opening your eyes. It doesn’t take much effort to keep the sound going in the background. “Just this thing. I can only make pretend storm noises. I think Karkat missed something when he was cleaning me out.”

“Oh,” she says, thinking about it. She crawls under the covers with you, and true to her word, stays far on the other side of the bed. She faces you as you lay back down. “Lose the hail, and make the thunder louder. I like the thunder.”

You do so, but you only raise the volume a little bit. Don’t want thunder waking her up randomly, after all. 

You watch her face as her eyes close, relaxed, your storm of sounds calming her down and easing her into sleep. She shifts under the sheets, and you feel her fingers lightly brush yours. You think ‘fuck it’ and let her hold your hand as she drifts off. When you're sure she’s completely out, you stop the storm. You turn your head to the window and watch the snow fall down again.

You still can’t get back to sleep.


End file.
